Stranger Labs is a “hack tank” formed by experts from industry and academia to research, develop, and promote the use of advanced technologies that enhance security, privacy, and resilience.
In the MIT tradition, a hack is a clever solution to an interesting problem. Less involved than prototypes, hacks can help you blast through barriers and grok feasibility, tradeoffs, and impact.
1 to 4 weeks
1 to 2 engineers
$5,000 +
Opportunity and risk go hand in hand with emerging technologies. Prototypes help you learn and adapt, before you have to bet the farm. We work with you to explore, build, evaluate, assimilate, and innovate.
1 to 6 months
2 to 5 engineers
$25,000 +
Open standards make interop possible and help us all extend our reach. We have plenty of experience reading RFCs and writing code to match. You can hire us to implement or co-sponsor a project. Let's collaborate!
Flexible
1 to 5 engineers
Contact us
"Christian Smith is one of the deepest thinkers I know on the topic of Digital Identity and the cryptography that makes it possible. On top of that he’s a quality guy who’s passionate about the intellectual integrity required to build the future of digital identity responsibly."
This team has history. From mountains to MIT. Across hemispheres and years. We've dreamed, hacked, learned, tinkered, tested, debugged, discovered, refactored, starved, hustled, feasted, focused, bloodied our knuckles, pulled all-nighters, shaved yaks, slayed dragons, powered through, stuck together. And we're just getting started.
Christian Smith is a backwoods open source hacker turned reluctant CEO. Prior to cofounding Stranger Labs, Christian led a team of research engineers at MIT Connection Science and was an invited expert on Solid at MIT CSAIL. At Anvil Research, he implemented standards like OpenID Connect, JOSE, and Web Cryptography API. An advocate of reasoning from first principles, Christian is unafraid to defy the wisdom of the crowd in pursuit of genuine innovation. He believes technology should serve people, not exploit them, and that one ought to be authentic and have integrity to work on code of consequence. When he's not trying to herd smarter nerds and torturing the Rust compiler, Christian imitates virtuosic South American guitarists poorly.
Greg Linklater, MSc. candidate is a mad scientist and researcher at heart. Long before co-founding Stranger Labs, Greg's frustration with forgetting his wallet and waiting in queues led to an obsession with digital identity, access controls, and by extension, cryptographic protocols. South Africa's frequent power and internet outages prompted him to research fault tolerance, mesh networks, and offline-first design. While pursuing a masters degree at Rhodes University, Greg honed his craft as an engineer by implementing internet standards at Anvil Research and MIT Connection Science. He loves to help others accomplish great things, and works very hard inventing new ways to be lazy. Greg tinkers with hardware to unwind, and he kicks ass at Humans vs. Zombies.
JC Bailey, MSc. candidate is the resident rocket surgeon at Stranger Labs. When not wrangling cryptography and computer vision code, he hacks data science and statistical analysis. After a year working with bespoke image processing frameworks for augmented reality software, JC returned to Rhodes University for a Masters degree. Backed by UNICEF, his research on computer vision for bioinformatics is helping create mobile health sensors for use in developing countries. His previous work includes integration of AR with rapid prototype robotics. In addition to his research specialization, JC is an expert mobile developer and has diverse programming and UX design experience.
St. John Giddy, LPIC-1 is a hacker daredevil and red team of one. Before joining Stranger Labs, St. John redefined "full stack", running a data center for marine scientists at South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs while building apps for oceanographic research. St. John studied computer science at Rhodes University and he's a certified LPIC-1 system admin. He's right at home using reverse engineering techniques to find security flaws and wringing performance from low power microprocessors. A poet in bytes, St. John finds beauty in bitshifts and matrix transformations, devising algorithms that create opportunity from adversity. In his free time he volunteers for Limpet, helping Cape Town youths discover science and technology.
Alex Pfeiffer is an expert programmer, security researcher, and self-professed privacy nut. At Stranger Labs, Alex works on mobile application security, data sync, mesh networking, and random feasibility hacks. Previously, Alex protected dozens of terabytes of sensitive environmental research data. From setting up tape drives, virtualization, and identity management to analyzing firewall traffic and conducting pen testing, he knows his way around a data center. He's been deep in the trenches with legacy code and had occasion to "regain access" to systems with lost credentials. At Rhodes University's Computer Science Society, Alex ran workshops on hardware and embedded programming. He spends entirely too much time customizing his Linux desktop.
Gregory Linklater • Christian Smith • Alan Herbert • Barry Irwin
The immaturity of current distributed key management solutions results in general disregard of security advisories in favour of convenience and accessibility. This research proposes the use of intermediate certificates as a distributed key management solution.
Gregory Linklater • Craig Marais • Alan Herbert • Barry Irwin
Faults are inevitable and frustrating, as we increasingly depend on network access and the chain of services that provides it, we suffer a greater loss in productivity when any of those services fail and service delivery is suspended. This research explores connectivity and infrastructure fault tolerance through offline-first application design.
Gregory Linklater • Christian Smith • James Connan • Alan Herbert • Barry Irwin
This research proposes JSON Schema as a modeling language that caters to the JSON object model paradigm on which to base an ABAC rule language. It continues to demonstrate its viability for the task by comparison against the features provided to XACML by XML Schema.
